Category Archives: Student
The Duration of Death: In Ruins
Standing on the shore of a pale city.
“By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.”
—Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things,” Book III, line 1087
Back in January I wrote about a story-light but emotion-heavy game called The Snowfield. It was such an oppressive experience (I mean this as a compliment) that I never managed to “finish” it, if such a thing can ever really be finished, even though it nagged at me for days. After eight months, another student project has caught my eye. This time it’s In Ruins from Tom Betts, a haunting twenty-minute expedition that’s both part of his research for his PhD and a prototype for the procedural generation that will be seen in the upcoming Sir, You Are Being Hunted by Big Robot.
I recommend you give it a try before reading on.
And Then the Whimper: The Snowfield
The opening scene. You can probably already tell that this will be one of Space-Biff!'s jollier posts.
You’d think, to hear some people talk,
_That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
_Hankering for wreathes and tombs and hearses.
—Siegfried Sassoon, “How to Die”
Here’s one for that strange cross-section of human beings who feel that a videogame can be more than just entertainment: The Snowfield by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (such a mouthful) does something that few games dare to attempt, and it pulls it off in fifteen minutes. It made me think. It made me sad. It made me shiver.
I’d recommend you play it before reading further. Once you have the Unity Web Player installed, you can play it right in your browser. Oh, and turn the volume up a bit.
SPACE-BIFF! 